Tag: Fitbit

Another year, another South By, another week of extensive walking and partaking in free parties and concerts. SXSW 2015 has truly turned Austin into a spring break for mid 20-year-olds. As usual, I always go in with zero expectations and just tried to have a good time.

Another crazy SXSW has come and gone in Austin, TX, and I’m completely exhausted. Unlike the past two years where most of my participation was during the Music portion of the festival, I explored extensively during Interactive (i.e. earlier). The biggest events I attended were the Dropbox party and the multi-day Rachael Ray Feedback House Party. The first was at a brand new bar on Rainey Street called Container Bar and featured live music from Wild Cub (they’re gonna blow up). The second was at an event space on East Cesar Chavez called Chick Ranch and featured tons of live bands and BBQ from a Chicago restaurant called Lillies. I managed to snag invites to both events for myself and a ton of my friends through some Twitter magic. Besides those, I walked around to a ton of the open venues all across downtown Austin to catch music and eat/drink free stuff. If you’re interested in seeing my photos, check out the Flickr set here.

I bought myself a Fitbit One right before the New Year in hopes of motivating more physical activity to offset my stationary lab lifestyle. It’s been just over three months since I started tracking my daily steps and most of my sleep. While I haven’t started running yet (I promise I’ll start eventually), it’s been fascinating to see my walking activity tracked throughout the day. One of my biggest complaints about Fitbit’s services is that they make you pay to access in-depth information about your activity. I think that it’s absolutely ludicrous to charge $49.99 a year to see the full extent of your data. With that said, they do offer an API for third-party development with access to the raw data (steps, distance, etc.) so I used this to automatically pull my daily activity into a Google Drive spreadsheet for easy access and analysis. Using this data, I generate my “health tracking” page featuring several charts of my ongoing Fitbit activity. The remainder of this post presents a summary of my Fitbit activity over the past 90 days since I got the One.